This invention relates to an oral rehabilitation device and particularly a device that is simply structured, effective and capable of protecting oral organ, and may be produced at low cost.
Cancer has long been a horror disease like nightmare to human being. With rapid medical technology innovation in recent years, a lot of cancers are curable if found out early and have been treated properly. Oral cancer is one of the instances. Some oral cancer patients will suffer from oral fibrosis at the later stage of oral cancer. Patients who have this problem cannot open their upper and lower jaws properly, or in severe cases, even cannot open the jaws at all. In order to help the patients to recover, oral rehabilitation exercise is very important during therapy treatment. Oral rehabilitation exercise is also needed in some other occasions such as for patients who have cheek surgical operation. Hence a good tool or device for patients to do oral rehabilitation exercise is much needed.
There are oral rehabilitation devices available in the market place. FIG. 1-1 illustrates one of the examples. It is constructed like a hand gun. It has a pair of movable upper tooth pad and lower tooth pad located at one end. There is a slant lever at one side which may be pressed to control the opening of the upper and lower tooth pad. When in use, the patient puts the closed tooth pads into oral cavity and uses the teeth to bite the upper and lower tooth pad (Shown in FIG. 1-2). Then press the slant lever to open the upper and lower tooth pad (shown in FIG. 1-3) for pushing the upper and lower jaws apart. Such a tool can only open the upper and lower jaws in one direction. It does not have elastic restoration power to facilitate opening and closing of the jaws. The rehabilitation effect is limited and takes longer time. Its structure is quite complicated and is costly to produce.
Some people use tongue depressor (shown in FIG. 1-4) used mostly by physicians for oral rehabilitation purpose. It usually is an elongate blade made of wood. Put one or more piece of the blade into oral cavity and levering it up and down, the jaws may be opened and extended. It is simple and costs little. However it has some degree of risk when using it. For instance, if the blade is made of wood of relatively hard nature, it might hurt oral tissues. If levering the blade with too much force, it could break or crack and harm oral tissues, and might have hazardous consequence. Hence there is still a need for designing a low cost and simple to use oral rehabilitation device.
In view of the foregoing disadvantages, it is therefore an object of this invention to provide a simple assembly that may be used to expand oral cavity easily for doing oral rehabilitation exercise.
Another object of this invention is to simplify the structure for lowering rehabilitation cost.
Still another object of this invention is to provide protection for the patients so that they won""t be hurt during doing oral rehabilitation exercise.